Chegg To Lay Off 22% of Workforce as AI Tools Shake Up Edtech Industry (reuters.com) 16
Chegg said on Monday it would lay off about 22% of its workforce, or 248 employees, to cut costs and streamline its operations as students increasingly turn to AI-powered tools such as ChatGPT over traditional edtech platforms. From a report: The company, an online education firm that offers textbook rentals, homework help and tutoring, has been grappling with a decline in web traffic for months and warned that the trend would likely worsen before improving.
Google's expansion of AI Overviews is keeping web traffic confined within its search ecosystem while gradually shifting searches to its Gemini AI platform, Chegg said, adding that other AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were courting academics with free access to subscriptions. As part of the restructuring announced on Monday, Chegg will also shut its U.S. and Canada offices by the end of the year and aim to reduce its marketing, product development efforts and general and administrative expenses.
Google's expansion of AI Overviews is keeping web traffic confined within its search ecosystem while gradually shifting searches to its Gemini AI platform, Chegg said, adding that other AI companies including OpenAI and Anthropic were courting academics with free access to subscriptions. As part of the restructuring announced on Monday, Chegg will also shut its U.S. and Canada offices by the end of the year and aim to reduce its marketing, product development efforts and general and administrative expenses.
Who? (Score:1)
Who?!
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"The company [is] an online education firm that offers textbook rentals, homework help and tutoring."
They're a paper mill. Pay them and they'll do your homework for you.
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Tech marches on... (Score:5, Funny)
"EdTech"? More like cheat-tech (Score:5, Insightful)
No one used Chegg for serious study. It is an answer platform. And how there are free AI resources that provide even better answers. So Chegg is doomed.
Chegg Was Doomed (Score:5, Informative)
Never believe a CEO. I worked at Chegg as AI was coming out, and the company's leadership claimed everything was still going to be just fine. "We have all the data (on what professors ask what questions and such), and Chat GPT doesn't, so students will still use us."
Flash forward to the mass layoffs (and the stock losing something like 90% of its value).
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You know as a student back in the day (Score:4)
Back in the day when I was a wee lad I tried doing some basic programming and for some reason my brain could not wrap itself around the concept of data statements and I just couldn't use them in my programs because it didn't make sense to my tiny kid brain.
Years later I just looked up how they worked and instantly understood it because I was a borderline adult. Of course by then I had long since stopped using a commodore 64 and trying to write basic programs but still.
Sometimes kids brains just hit a wall and you need teachers to explain it but I'm old enough that I didn't have a programming teacher when I was a kid. And I was too stupid to ask for books at the library. I didn't know you could walk up to the librarian and just ask them to order books for you.
Fun fact back in the '80s there was a little tiny rural library in the United Kingdom with the world's best programming library because one of the kids there who grew up to write games for 8-bit and 16-bit computers knew that he could request books and he just kept asking for more and more books.
I'm not a horrible programmer but I wonder how much better I could have been if I had had access to not just more information but information in a different format until I could understand it.
Never mind when you are taught the wrong way. Buddy of mine plats guitar and they learned a whole bunch of bad technique when they were young because they had a crummy teacher and it's almost impossible to unlearn that bad technique.
Makes sense to me (Score:2, Interesting)
I used to read 5-6 non-fiction books per month, but that has dropped in half since I starting using LLMs for a significant amount of my continuous learning. I haven't stopped reading books, but I can usually get 80% of the insight in 20% of the time using AI. Now I focus my reading on filling that 20% gap.
I don't think AI is going to remove the rest of the EdTech industry, but it is bound to reduce the market size of non-AI education methods by quite a bit.
Students (Score:3)
The students will be AI too. Who wants to sit down all day listening to rambling BS, just have the computer do it for you.
Burn it to the ground and salt the earth (Score:2)
Prisons with screens (Score:2)
What we do instead is talk about how important they are.
We appear to be well on the way to equilibrium already - standardized educational units for consumption, standardized evaluations, policeresource officers to provide the important educational messages.
Eliminating the teachers (coded as "women work", which aside from the sexism and inaccuracy, also exposes how
Cheating service beaten by newer cheating service (Score:1)
And nothing of value was lost. I do find it kinda odd how many people are on staff at these companies that essentially do nothing.